(Note: I began a slightly similar discussion at Outreach to other activist groups but I mean to take this page in a more general, maybe more interesting, and possibly altogether better, although different, direction.)
I started thinking about this topic recently when jolted by two stimuli:
With MathWeb, I thought: Well, it is great to have some discussion and connection going between people who are interested in "supporting mathematics on the web", that's swell – but what about discussion and connection between all of the other people out there who must be working on math and computers, and AI, and pedagogy, and linguistics, and free content – ideally, all the sorts of people who might be interested in our Metacommons Manifesto – but what about even just that relatively small subset who is really working on substantial meta-level issues directly related to mathematics? Why isn't there a webpage or wiki or mailing list being set up for them? Certainly "the web" isn't so special that we should ignore all other mediated mathematical experiences?
And in response to all of these questions, I was dumbfounded.
And with the MAA, I thought: OK, so none of us is located in Washington, so none of us can show up at the MAA's office to bug them every day – but maybe that wouldn't even be the right approach. We all have phones, and they have phone numbers, and we can be polite and tactful and, above all, mercilessly persistent – and maybe if we keep up the barage of phone calls and suffer every redirection gracefully, we will eventually find a strong source of support in this organization.
Who, I might add, really ought to support PlanetMath and all of the other computer-math and generally mediated-math research and experience that is going on in the world today. And not just that organization, but also the other organizations that have some stake in the future of mathematics.
Now, in fact, the MathWeb homepage links, prominently, to a Mathematical Knowledge Management Interest Group homepage (which, presumably, is actually maintained by the same people). The latter looks "closed", "dead", and in every other way insufficient as a point of actual substantial interesting connection between people. Just possibly it could be a vector indication some right direction – but more likely, it indicates that these MKM people haven't got a clue about how to do "live" collaborations, and wouldn't be intersted in doing them if they could!
Sad day! This seems to suggest that if we actually wanted to interact with these people
I would suggest that in both cases – so-called "MKM", and traditional mathematics organizations -- we might start by asking ourselves what a good collaboration would look like. We could also start by willy-nilly making phone-calls, writing emails, and just generally tearing the hell out of all available broadcast networks in order to solicit opinions and interactions from people who we think might have relevant things to say, either on the basic level of collaboration, or on the meta-level of what makes a good collaboration.
--jcorneli Minneapolis, end of Thanksgiving vacation